The bite-back

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Food is sensory not spiritual, so it’s usually just a case of ‘eat, drink and be merry and be careful of your weight’. There isn’t any other dimension to it. But when it comes to animal food, a stomach full of meat is a mind full of murder.
We put our very sensitivity on the line when it comes to indulging in animal-eating. Both compassion and intelligence are compromised by the use of animal foods, specifically by our conniving with the enslaving and killing of animals for food.
We aren’t out there hunting them or risking our safety since they don’t fight back. Everything has been made easy. The wild of Nature has been tamed – ‘food animals’ are docile and we imprison them to make sure they remain so. But the animals do bite back in a subtle and unseen way. The eating of their bodies and secretions is a creeping damage - after eating them continuously we often put on weight and suffer the ill effects of diabetes and heart disease. If we are tied to animal-based cuisine it will slow us down and in a subtle way weaken our affectionate nature, so that we no longer care for the beings for which we’d otherwise feel great affection.
The bottom line here is that we can’t resist eating them. So many delicious foods are animal-based. Why should we deny the enjoyment of them to ourselves?
Because animals represent such rich pickings for humans, it would seem like madness NOT to take advantage of them. But by choosing to use animals we bring out the worst in ourselves. The guilt or shame might be heavy enough, but being addicted to animal products, spending so much money on them, the chronic conditions they bring on, all adds up to a ‘slow-down’ ... our self development is held back by mindlessly consuming what must surely be the most ugly products on the market.
The Animal Industries are happy to do our dirty work for us, rearing and killing and presenting the end product, just so long as we don’t make a fuss about it. The deal is that we do our best to turn a blind eye to the horror while they conceal as much of it from us as they can - we conspire together to objectify the living being.
Over the years we’ve executed billions of animals, none of whom have ever been guilty of any crime. This wash of cruelty and destruction has forced us to pretend to ourselves that what happens to animals doesn’t actually happen ... and to then believe about ourselves that we are not cold blooded killers, when we know that isn’t so.